AADO renamed as Union of American Eye Care Providers

The American Association of Doctors of Optometry announced today that it has changed its name to the Union of American Eye Care Providers.

According to a press release issued by the organization, the new name more accurately illustrates what the organization is as well as its goals.

“We are also watching closely how the Northwestern University football player case proceeds," Craig S. Steinberg, OD, JD, executive director of the organization, said in the release. "If the decision allowing them to unionize is upheld, we want to be prepared to argue that, like the players being found to be employees of the university, eye care providers are de facto employees of vision care plans by virtue of the excessive control the plans exercise over us. This will enable us to ask the National Labor Relations Board for the right to exercise the full panoply of union rights, including the rights to collectively bargain with third-party plans for fair reimbursements on behalf of our members, and to engage in group boycotts against unfair treatment by the plans."

In a previous interview with Primary Care Optometry News, Steinberg discussed that he started AADO after reading about a physicians’ union.

"We know that unions can't exist generally in health care, but yet, this union exists," he told PCON. "I realized that the extent that they are a union is pretty limited. They represent doctors that are employees of counties, states and municipalities, and so they're working in a traditional union role there. But they branched out and started representing individual physicians and medical doctors and doing other things that they could do for them. They can't do everything because you can't collectively bargain unless you have a common employer, but there were a lot of things they could do, and they were successful in representing the interests of a lot of doctors."